New York Occasions Best Seller

Called a Best Reserve of 2019 by Vogue and NPR’s Maureen Corrigan

‘Freudenberger’s brilliant and compassionate book takes on the best questions of the universe and proves, again, that she is among America’s greatest writers.’ –Andrew Sean Greer, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer of Less

An emotionally engaging, suspenseful new book through the best-selling author, told in the tone of voice of a renowned physicist: an exploration of feminine friendship, romantic love, and parenthood– about Shed and Needed: A novel bonds that show their power in amazing ways.

Helen Clapp’s breakthrough focus on five-dimensional spacetime landed her a tenured professorship at MIT; her popular books explain physics in plain conditions. Helen disdains notions from the supernatural in favor of rational thought and proven suggestions. So it’s probably especially vexing on her behalf when, on an usually unremarkable Wed in June, she gets a phone call from a pal who has simply died.

That friend was Charlotte Boyce, Helen’s roommate at Harvard. Both women had once confided in each other about everything–in university, the unwanted developments Charlie received from a celebrity literature professor; after graduation, Helen’s problems as a woman in technology, Charlie’s as a black screenwriter in Hollywood, their distributed challenges simply because parents. But mainly because the years passed, Charlie became more elusive, and her calls came less and less often. And now she’s completely, tragically gone.

As Helen is drawn back to Charlie’s orbit, and also into the internet of feelings she once had for Neel Jonnal–a previous college classmate now an acclaimed physicist on the verge of the Nobel Prize-winning discovery–she is forced to issue the laws of the world that had often steadied her brain and heart.

Suspenseful, perceptive, deeply affecting, Lost and Wanted is a story of friends and lovers, lost and found, at most defining occasions of their lives.